Mixed Kids

I used to question why my white God didn't make me in his image, used to wonder why little white boys snickered through their teeth, why they called my skin dirt, not like the soil rich with life just dirt, the kind that serves at your feet, the kind that makes you stink if you don't scrub it off, I prayed to scrub it off. I know the temptation to dissociate what the world shames i know the temptation of a planned escape. Mixed kid you think this hunt of black bodies does not apply to you. You who have mastered a lost art of survival hiding in plain sight. Dressing in camouflage doesn't make us apart of the forest. Even if the white bodies at our dinner table breathe easy. Even if the white boss who knows us as half kin loosens their tongue lets us in through the backdoor. You cannot hide behind what our whiteness has afforded us. That thin shield, that false security that myth, that liar. Can't deny half ourselves and expect to be more than 3/4, you think you're safe long as the white in your blood loosens your curl. Honey your curl pattern won't save you. Can't excuse yourself from genocide. Mix kid, don't you know we are thieves of a white supremacist bloodline. They'll come back for what we stole, like their pride, their purity, their daughters, their sons, whiteness makes background noise of a holocaust, and another holocaust and another holocaust, steals homes from underneath our feet, underneath our grave. Broadcast dead bodies into our living room and convicts them from breaking and entering. Don't we see it as asphyxiating our schools, cramping our hospitals, foaming at the mouth of the courts, in the banks, in our water pipes, in uniform, what has whiteness not corroded, do we not see how it poisons every system it's apart of. Are our bodies not systems. Mixed kid, this whiteness around us has made us sick, nauseous every time we look in the mirror, becomes what be pray to, to burn the roots of our hair. Like the cross, like my mother's straight into compliance, becomes our idol fake role model, undeserving. Teaches us to fly with wax wings. Teaches us invincibility,  we never owned. Because to think yourself a white person when you're not a white person is a set up to fail, to fall, to get fired, killed, exercised from your own body. We can't just grit our teeth, we can't just roll our eyes. Tried the venom into the cup of white tears it's the only way to siphon out the poison. Pour it down the drain when your mother says you don't have good hair, your cousin calls black people thugs, except no poison that keeps them off the front line of the genocide against us. We must teach our mouths to unlearn the silence it thinks protects us. Tell your skin, you're sorry for every time you wish scrape away your melanin. Tell it that when the world called it dirt it meant you could sprout new worlds. Apologize to your hair for hiding it in wastebaskets. Pray to strike down the white guy that allowed you to commit violence against yourself. You are not a mule, not a skunk, not a mut, tell the world you're black, tell your mother you're black, tell your father you are black, do not stutter with shame, tell them they can never truly love us until they see all of us that to love us radically is to see us for the magic in our blackness. Mixed kid you cannot escape your magic, curse those who would make you think you could, or make you want to.